• DOI:10.1007/S10745-005-2435-7
• Corpus ID: 154454141

There is No Mother Nature—There is No Balance of Nature: Culture, Ecology and Conservation

@article{Jelinski2005ThereIN,
  title={There is No Mother Nature—There is No Balance of Nature: Culture, Ecology and Conservation},
  author={Dennis E. Jelinski},
  journal={Human Ecology},
  year={2005},
  volume={33},
  pages={271-288}
}

• D. Jelinski
• Published 1 April 2005
• Art
• Human Ecology

Postmodern philosophy asserts there are only socially constructed narratives and "situated knowledge" that serve for all forms of explanation (Smith, 1989). Narratives, by definition, have a narrator who picks and chooses the constraints: essentially the who, what, when, where and why in a story. Narrators as storytellers then employ these constraints as the structural entities, the so-called "facts" (Allen et al., 2001), to make events into static things. In other words, the narrative is meant to "transform the real into an object of desire through formal coherence and moral order that the real (otherwise) lacks" (Ettema and Glasser, 1989, p. 258). A newspaper article, for example, exclaiming that Mother Nature is responsible for inclement weather is an example of a narrative. According to Latour and Strum (1986, p. 171), narrators "are at best inferring, at worst inventing, since they are always creating fictive or speculative accounts." Narratives often make extensive use of metaphors such as "the web of life." According to Boyd ((1993), and see Wilson, 1998), metaphors in science are either pedagogical or theory-constitutive. That is, metaphors are either used to explain the connection between objects and qualities, or they are used to express theoretical claims for which there is, as yet, no non-metaphorical formulation. From a semantic point of view, metaphor is defined as a mapping from source to target domain (Lakoff and